A Truce in the War Over Family

By Andrew J. Cherlin

March 30, 2015

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THE war over the family has been a disheartening part of American politics for decades. Conservatives saw growing numbers of children born outside of marriage and thought the family as they knew it was in trouble, the result of a cultural decline — a decrease in personal responsibility, and a growing dependence on government social welfare programs. Liberals saw families struggling and thought the problems reflected poverty and the dearth of good jobs.

But today, while partisanship is sky high, the two camps are showing surprising signs of a truce. It’s a promising moment for change: Both sides just might agree on measures to help the millions of families that have been caught in the middle of the battle.

The origin of the family war can perhaps be traced to a White House conference on family issues that Jimmy Carter proposed during his 1976 presidential campaign. That effort morphed into three regional White House conferences, in Baltimore, Minneapolis and Los Angeles, that were delayed until 1980 as interest groups fought over their direction and even their titles. Conservatives wanted them to be called conferences on “the family,” which would signal that marriage-based families were the single best kind. Liberals wanted them to be called conferences on “families,” which would signal that a diversity of families was worthy of support. The latter view prevailed, but the deeply riven conferences were widely judged to be inconsequential.

Since then, the two sides have occasionally reached agreement, most notably on the 1996 welfare reform law that was pushed by conservatives and signed by President Clinton. Most of the time, however, they have dug in their heels, even as the percentage of out-of-wedlock births rose from 18.4 percent in 1980 to 40.6 percent in 2013.

Lately, however, the conservative and liberal positions have both shown signs of change. Some conservatives acknowledge that changes in the economy have hurt families, a marked departure from insisting that personal choices are solely to blame. In an op-ed article last fall, Senators Mike Lee of Utah and Marco Rubio of Florida, both Republicans, wrote of the average worker’s problems: “In recent years, old industries have fallen, new ones have risen, the skills required for high-paying jobs have evolved, and the competition at all levels is increasingly global.”

Liberals now seem to acknowledge the downsides of the retreat from marriage. A report on strengthening families that was released in January by the liberal Center for American Progress recommended not only economic assistance but also social support, such as couples’ counseling services and visits by specially trained nurses and other professionals to the parents of young children.

The growth of legal same-sex marriage has made it possible for liberals to endorse the importance of marriage without feeling that they have abandoned their commitment to equality. Same-sex couples are seizing the opportunity to marry in large numbers: According to American Community Survey data analyzed by the demographer Gary J. Gates of the Williams Institute at the University of California, Los Angeles, School of Law, 34 percent of all same-sex couples in the Northeast in 2013 were married. Far from undermining heterosexual marriage, as its opponents warned, same-sex marriage has broadened support for marriage beyond its conservative base.

If the truce leads to legislation, tax credits might be a possibility. Conservatives such as Senators Rubio and Lee support an expanded tax credit for parents who are raising children. Representative Paul D. Ryan, Republican of Wisconsin, and others are backing an extension of the earned-income tax credit to childless adults which, they hope, will increase their incentive to work, and help them marry and start families.

Strong differences on the design of tax credits still exist. Should a child tax credit be aimed primarily at families with incomes high enough to owe taxes at the end of the year, as appears to be the case in the Lee-Rubio plan, or should it extend to families with incomes so low that they pay little in taxes? And should an extension of the earned-income tax credit be paid for by increasing the taxes paid by high-income individuals, as liberals and centrists have proposed, or primarily by cutting programs that mostly benefit low- and moderate-income individuals, as Representative Ryan has proposed?

A tougher test of the truce would be whether anyone can summon broad support for providing paid parental leave. Current federal law requires large employers to offer 12 weeks of unpaid family leave, which few low-income workers can afford to take. Conservatives often say that they favor programs that encourage work, and paid family leave would most likely do that: In wealthy countries with paid leave, women are more likely to be in the work force, although they tend to work part-time more than American women do.

Continuing differences such as these suggest that the current pause in the family war could be merely a lull, but even a hint that the two sides might be able to find common ground is encouraging. We should take advantage of it before hostilities resume.

Andrew J. Cherlin is a sociologist at Johns Hopkins University and the author of “Labor’s Love Lost: The Rise and Fall of the Working-Class Family in America.”